Reincarnation is an odd thing. In the vast majority of cases, a reincarnated soul will retain no more than slight echoes of their past lives. At most, a person might find themselves having odd flashes of insight related to the experiences of their past lives.
There are some exceptions, of course. Some monastics are capable of awakening memories of their previous lives, or even of seeing the past lives of others. Some magics exist that allow their wielders to recover scattered memories of things that once were.
And sometimes, a soul gets gut-punched by a spell that should throw it straight back into the cycle of reincarnation and finds itself with total recall of who it was, once upon a time.
But that's some movie-level amnesia nonsense, so it doesn't happen very often. Maybe once in a thousand years.
In October of 1981, little Harry Potter's soul resisted the Killing Curse's attempt to throw it out of his body, and someone else woke up.
Rowena Ravenclaw brought her hand to her head, intending to massage away the headache she'd found herself with. This proved difficult, as her arm and hand seemed rather less coordinated than she remembered. She looked down at herself, and suppressed a sigh.
She'd ended up as an infant again. While she couldn't remember what happened, this was probably Helga's fault, somehow — it had been the last three times, after all. She suspected it was revenge for the fact that Rowena had decided to skip past the waste of time of marriage and pregnancy and just created a homunculus daughter when Helga had gotten on her case about needing an heir. It was unfair, considering she had helped out when Helga wanted to bear a child, but when she had complained to Salazar he insisted that the real reason was obvious and she was just blind.
Ridiculous man. As if Rowena could be oblivious to anything — she had the most brilliant mind to have ever graced this planet of simpletons!
Rowena's wand was nowhere in sight, and she didn't recognize the half-destroyed room she was in or the corpses on the floor, but she could figure all of that out later — she probably just had temporary amnesia about some kind of experiment she'd been conducting. She clenched her tiny fist and cast the counterspell to the de-aging potion.
Nothing happened. Rowena frowned. Well, that wasn't right. She tried to remember how she might have ended up in this situation, and…
Ah. The last thing she remembered was an explosion when the erumpent-nundu hybrid she'd bred had sneezed so hard that it flew into a wall. She had probably died and been reincarnated. How vexing. She had no idea how much time had passed since her death — how many advancements had been made to magic in the time that she'd been indisposed? Unacceptable. She would need to catch up before she could begin doing her own research again, and that prospect grated on her.
It was a mark of Rowena's unusual level of self-confidence that she didn't even stop to consider how it was that she had completely retained her memories in her new life, despite the fact that she knew full well that such a thing was almost unheard of. She simply took it as a given that her brilliance was enough to transcend death and rebirth.
And perhaps that was justified, as a Killing Curse reawakening a past life really is an absurd idea. Better to assume that Rowena's genius was simply unable to be repressed by something as trifling as death, then.
For Rowena, this really wasn't an ideal situation. Now that she knew she'd been reincarnated, she could guess that the bodies on the ground were probably her new parents rather than deceased test subjects. There was no sign of their murderer, so at least she didn't need to worry about fighting off someone while limited by an infant body, but… if nobody came and found her soon, she'd need to figure something out. And that wasn't even getting into how ill-suited an infant body was to doing magical research! How would she buy the books she needed to catch up with the modern state of magic? Could her stubby little infant fingers even turn the pages?
Rowena took a moment to lament the fact that she had pushed back her research on shape-shifting and immortality in favor of attempting to produce the cutest, most deadly form of pet that she could. She would have to get back to that as soon as she had reached a more useful age — there was no way she would risk letting something like this happen again now that she knew how much it sucked.
The sound of loud footsteps startled her out of her thoughts, and she peered at the doorway. Hopefully this was just some concerned citizen and not anybody dangerous.
An absolutely enormous man with a shaggy black beard squeezed into the room. He had to be a half-giant — an ogre or half-ogre would have hair more like fur than human hair. Rowena stared up at him suspiciously. A full giant would almost certainly eat an unattended infant, but the temperament of half-giants varied. If she was lucky, this would be one of the ones that were stupid, but friendly.
Her concerns were alleviated when the half-giant caught sight of the body of the red-haired woman that was probably Rowena's new mother. The man burst into tears, which indicated that he was probably a friend of the family. That was good — half-giants were very resistant to magic, and while Rowena was more than capable of overcoming that problem, it was hard to shape magic with an infant's feeble body.
The half-giant's tear-stained face turned to her, and the beginnings of a smile became visible on his face. "Harry, yer okay!" he croaked, stumbling over to Rowena's crib.
'Hairy?' What kind of name was that supposed to be? Had she been born with an unusual quantity of hair and a pair of particularly unimaginative parents? Rowena felt insulted. 'Hairy' was not a name that would inspire awe — she would need to see about changing it as soon as possible.
"Hagrid?" Another shaky male voice asked. "I saw James. Is… is Lily…?"
"Sirius?" The apparent 'Hagrid' turned around.
"Yeah, it's me," the new man confirmed as he walked into the room. His eyes went first to the body of the woman — 'Lily,' Rowena guessed — and then to the crib.
"Harry," Sirius breathed, relieved. "He's okay."
'He?' Rowena puffed up in irritation. She had been reincarnated into a male body? What was this nonsense?
…on second thought, that might not be all that bad. It would be simple to adapt the spell she had used to remove the sexual characteristics of her previous body to work on this one, and considering the fact that it would require less modification of her innards she could probably use the spell safely even with a child body's poor control of magic. Being able to properly make herself neuter before needing to suffer through puberty a second time sounded incredibly appealing, and it's not like she particularly cared what pronouns were used to refer to her. If she did, she probably would have corrected Godric herself rather than let him carry on with his mistaken identification of her as male for the months prior to meeting Helga.
Rowena tuned out the rest of the conversation between Hagrid and Sirius as she mentally went to work on the arithmancy she'd need to properly transform herself, and didn't snap out of her focus even when the enormous man scooped her up and took her on a trip in some flying contraption. She didn't even break focus when a tall man with an absolutely ridiculous beard tucked an envelope into the basket she'd been placed in.
Just before sunrise, she completed her spell, nodding in satisfaction when she felt her genitalia recede up into her body and disappear. Problem solved.
Quite satisfied with her work, she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
I'm putting the finishing touches on the next chapter of Sights Unseen, but because that's a more structured work I'm also doing some outlining for the future to make sure I've got my ducks in a row! In the meantime, have some of this. It will usually have chapters of 1k-2k words, posted whenever I write one up, and isn't intended to be particularly serious. I hope it's entertaining!
